What Happens When You Dedicate A Year To Optimising Your Life & The Happiness Fantasy - Carl Cederstrom - #033

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends, we are back again. And this week, we're talking about life hacks, but perhaps with a little bit of a different angle. Carl Cederstrom is an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, part of Stockholm University, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review, amongst many others. Carl spent 12 months immersed in the human optimization movement. Him and his co-author, André Spicer, dedicated one month of the year to a different area of their life and trying to optimize it as much as possible. This is the absolute zenith Mount Everest of trying to optimize your life, and the experiences that Carl went through have elicited some really, really interesting results. He'll tell us exactly what, out of 12 months of pure optimization, was the single best tool that he came across, how he was able to optimize his sex, his relationships, his vanity, his looks, his finances, and a whole bunch of other things. And then we move on to his new book, which is called The Happiness Fantasy. Now, recently we've discussed happiness quite a bit, with Susanna Hallinan and in the Q&A that I did with Johnny and Yusef. And it's interesting to see Carl's approach to it. He makes a strong case that happiness isn't something that any of us should be aiming for and that there are much more worthy terms that would make us much more fulfilled and content within life. I'm going to leave it there. I won't present any spoilers for the rest of the episode, but I wanted to give another shout out to Scott McGrath, who sent in a screenshot of him sending out on another company, Internal Intranet, one of our podcast episodes. Now, thanks very much for that, Scott. I really appreciate it. Again, if you do manage to share one of the episodes on a big network, please let me know, and I'll be able to give you a shout out on a future episode. Coming up soon, we have got How to Survive University, me, Jonny and Youssef talking about that, and the long-awaited Life Fails 101 edition, which is essentially the antithesis to our very slick approach to human optimization. So there's lots of exciting stuff coming up, but for now, here's Carl.
Mr. Carl Cederstrom, how are you today?

**Carl Cederstrom** (2:37)
I'm very good, thank you. How are you doing?

**Chris Williamson** (2:39)
Very good, thank you. All the way from the increasingly cold England at the moment. Where are you in the world?

**Carl Cederstrom** (2:47)
I'm in the increasingly cold Sweden, Stockholm to be precise.

**Chris Williamson** (2:54)
Very nice. You're an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, right?

**Carl Cederstrom** (2:58)
That's right, which is part of Stockholm University.

**Chris Williamson** (3:01)
Fantastic. For the listeners at home, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

**Carl Cederstrom** (3:06)
All right. Well, I live in Sweden, been living in the UK, in Cardiff for a few years, but now based here, live in Stockholm, two children, a wife, and the author of a few books, which I believe we will talk a little bit about. What else can I tell you? That's it, really, I think that would be necessary to know.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
That's the brief, the zeitgeist tape to Carl Cederstrom, I like it. Did you manage to tune your hearing into the Welsh accent very quickly when you were over there?

**Carl Cederstrom** (3:43)
Well, I mean, I could still now today spot it and recognise it quite easily, much more easily than before, but I was never able to imitate it or speak anything like the Welsh accent. It's very subtle.
I mean, my English is just too inferior to imitate any kind of accent. Just as Swedish, maybe I could do a French, German or Danish accent if I really try to.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
I got you. Well, I won't make you jump through that hurdle today.

**Carl Cederstrom** (4:14)
Thanks.

**Chris Williamson** (4:14)
That's okay. So I want to get straight into it. You have had an interesting journey with the field of human optimisation. Would that be fair to say?

**Carl Cederstrom** (4:27)
Yeah, that's fair to say.

**Chris Williamson** (4:30)
So as a lot of the listeners will know, we have our most popular series is a sequence of episodes called Life Hacks. And on those, we try and find tips and tricks, strategies and approaches for a productive and efficient life. And you took the human optimisation movement to an extreme for 12 months, yourself and your co-author and friend, Andre Spicer, is that right?

**Carl Cederstrom** (4:57)