Moment 146: 3 Simple Steps That Guarantees Ultimate Happiness (Jay Shetty's Happiness Model)

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

Over the years, I've tried to kind of simplify what happiness is. And I sit here with my guests, and Moghadad was great at that as well.

Jay Shetty (0:09)

Oh, yeah, of course.

Steven Bartlett (0:10)

He's unbelievable at kind of the concept of happiness. What are the kind of simple fundamentals that Jay Shetty requires in his life to live a happy life? I'm going to use the word happy. I know it's a shitty word in many respects, but I just want to use that as the word.

Jay Shetty (0:26)

Yeah, I'd say that I look at happiness as daily habits and then deeper purpose. So there's things you can do daily that keep that happiness kind of moving and feel it's growing. And then there's almost the objective, the compass, the reason why you live and why you exist. And for me, it's been really clear that finding your passion and using it in the service of others is what creates the greatest, deepest happiness. When you find what you love, what you excel at, what you're brilliant at, and then you can actually use that to improve people's lives and you can use that skill, that passion, that energy to make a difference in someone's life, there is no better feeling than that. And what I find is I meet a lot of people who've mastered their passion, but not for service. They mastered it for business, they mastered it for money, they mastered it for success, and they have all of that, but they haven't got the service element in their life. They don't understand how to use their passion for a purpose, and so they feel unequipped. And then I know lots of people who are trying to serve, who are trying to make a difference, who are trying to do charity work, they're trying to do all this good work, and they feel good about it, but they still don't feel fulfilled because they're missing what is my special role, like what's my position, what's my offering in this space, you kind of get lost after a while. And so to me, happiness is where both come together, where it's like, I know what I love, and what makes me happy. And when I do that for others to improve their lives, it makes them happy. So if you can do what makes you happy, and do it for others and it makes them happy, that's gonna give you happiness. And I have tested that principle time and time again with clients, with friends, with family, with myself. And I've seen it to be true again and again and again. But that's that bigger happiness piece. Let's go to the daily habits, like the daily stuff. And I want to try and avoid the stuff that I think people have heard and people have probably come across before in many different places. Maybe I've spoken about them, maybe other people have. But one of the biggest ones for me is, I read a book a few years ago about flow state. And that book really transformed how I felt about things. And it talks about how being in flow is the intersection where your skills and your challenge match. So if your skills are higher than your challenge, you will feel bored, lethargic and maybe feel stuck. But if your challenge is greater than your skills, you feel overwhelmed, potentially depressed and disconnected and disappointed. So most of us are living in one of those discrepancies, and I find on a daily basis, I'm playing around with that equation for happiness. Because that flow state, when you know you have a skill and your challenge is met, and even if you lose, you still get such a joy out of it because you know that you're still working in the right direction. And I think that is an underplayed part of happiness because it doesn't sound like something predictable or obvious because people go, well, that's achievement, that's ambition. It's actually not. It's just saying, for most people, it's either or. Their challenges are greater than their skill or their skill is greater than their challenge. So I would ask everyone to say, look at your life. Do you need to improve your skills or do you need to broaden your challenge? Is this a year of expanding your challenges or is this a year of broadening your skills? And I promise you, if you start with that, you're going to get so busy and active changing one of those, that happiness is going to naturally flow. This comes into a little model I created of creating happiness for my year. And that one sits in one of them, so I'll explain which one it's in. I believe that to create happiness day to day in one year, in one month, in a week, you have to have three things. You have to learn something every year, you have to launch something every year, and you have to love something every year. And that's how I've lived for the last three to five years. Every year I'm learning something, every year I'm launching something, and every year I'm loving something. And I'll give you an example. So, when I talk about flow state, that comes into the idea of raising your challenge is like launching something. The reason why launching something creates happiness is because it creates a feeling of nervousness, it creates a feeling of butterflies, it creates a feeling of excitement, like I don't know what's gonna happen. We all need a feeling of surprise in life, we all need that feeling of, I don't know, the sense of the unknown can actually cause happiness. And so launching something is such a powerful way, and I think too many people will think for five years and think for 10 years and maybe launch one thing in their whole life. And me and you have both, I mean, I'd love to, I can't wait to interview on my podcast, but I have launched so much stuff that has failed.