Moment 151: Neuroscientist Reveals The 3 Things You Need To Do For A Fulfilling Life: Tali Sharot

Steven Bartlett (0:03)

When you started studying neuroscience and psychology, were there some fundamentals about the nature of life and the nature of human beings that, I'm sure there's so many of them, but were there any real fundamentals that were debunked or reversed as it relates to your own personal perspective? Whether it's about personal responsibility or about agency or autonomy, about how much control we have, about how much influence we have over our happiness, were there anything foundational that had a real impact on your personal life?

Tali Sharot (0:32)

There's one thing that recently is just something that I recently changed my mind on, and that was actually while writing the current book that I'm writing, which I'm writing together with Cass Einstein, who is the co-author of Nudge. It was actually in fact about happiness. I remember this clearly. I was in a workshop at the LSC, and they did a survey. They asked, who thinks that happiness is the most important thing? That everything you do is for happiness. And everyone had to stand on a scale. If you think it's all about happiness, stand here. And if you think it's not at all, stand here. And I was standing here. I was thinking anything that we do, we do for happiness and that all matters.

And while writing this book, actually, we both came to the conclusion, and for me it was a change of mind, that happiness is actually one of three factors that matter.

So one is happiness. The second is meaning. A lot of things you do because it gives you meaning, and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness. Sometimes the two go hand in hand, right? But sometimes it doesn't.

So you could do work that's meaningful, and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness, and sometimes it does. And then there's a third factor that's also really interesting, which is called the psychological rich life, which is basically variety. A lot of people just do things for diversity, for variety, to try a lot of different things. And again, sometimes it goes hand in hand with meaning and happiness, but sometimes it doesn't. And that kind of explains why many times we make choices that we understand is not necessarily going to gain us more happiness, but it will gain us some other thing, one of these two other things that together, I think, is what brings a good life, right?

And that is something I think I changed my mind on, that we're not actually motivated for happiness, probably defined as a good feeling, kind of joy.

Steven Bartlett (2:31)

Why do humans care about having variety in their life?

Tali Sharot (2:35)

I mean, there's kind of the unconscious evolutionary reason. Give me that one. So I think it's exploration, right? To move forward, both as an individual and as a society, we have to explore a lot of different things.

Some of these things are not necessarily gonna give you happiness immediately or for you at all, but a lot of times, if you explore a lot of things, you will find something that is gonna be very important, maybe for yourself, maybe for our species. I always give kind of the really simple example of our ancestors leaving Africa to explore the rest of the world, right? They had, I mean, why would they do that? I mean, either they thought there was something better for them to find, right? And it was probably very hard to do, but that's just kind of an example of exploration, right? You're trying different things.

And I can see it in my own life, right? I often do something and then I kind of, okay, I had enough with this, let's try something else. And so variety is kind of a factor that I'm trying to maximize.

It's kind of a balance, right? It's exploration and exploitation, right? So you need to do a little bit of exploitation because you found something that works and something that you're good at. You don't want to just leave it be. But on the other hand, if you just stick with one thing, you may be missing a whole other, a lot of different things.

Steven Bartlett (3:55)

It's like farming and hunting. It's like the analogy from that book, Who Moved My Cheese. When I think about variety, my brain was going, well, I know some people that get so caught up in their comfort zones that they never go exploring.

The thought that we'd be motivated or fulfilled by variety, by new things, by adventure, seems to sit in conflict with a lot of people that I know that are stuck in a situation and maybe not happy, but they're more confident in the known than they are leaving that place and venturing out.