The REAL Formula For Success and Happiness | The Mel Robbins Podcast

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Happiness is 'the joy you feel moving towards your potential'

  Shawn Achor, Harvard-trained researcher and author of The Happiness Advantage, Big Potential and Before Happiness, rejects the pleasure model of happiness because pleasure is fleeting and only shows up when life is good. Joy, as he defines it, is directional: it's the sense of growth that can coexist with fear and pain, which is why it can shorten the troughs of hard seasons. He deliberately wants happiness and joy to be conflated.

• 02

  The brain moves the goalposts every time you succeed

  Achor says external circumstances are a poor predictor of happiness: get the degree, then you need a job, then a promotion. He saw it in his own career; finishing a book felt like the summit until worries about readers and the next book set in. Echoing Maslow's hierarchy, he argues it's not where you are on the ladder that makes you happy but whether you feel you're moving up.

• 03

  Step one is recognizing that 'I'll be happy when' doesn't work

  Asked by a listener how to stop relying on money, a job or a partner, Achor says first acknowledge the brain is built to foil the idea that success guarantees happiness. His example is the pandemic: people expected to be happy when it waned, forgetting they weren't 100% happy before it. He adds a caveat: internal change doesn't negate the need to fight inequality, discrimination and racism; it gives you the power to fight them.

• 04

  Multiple realities are true at once, so choose which to focus on

  The week before recording, Achor went to the ER with chest pains and missed his first talk in two decades. He was fine. In that room, 'I'm in a hospital and not with my family' was true, and so was 'I'm going home today to two kids and a wife I love.' Because the brain's resources are finite, he chooses the reality that helps him take the next step.

• 05

  Happiness is a team sport, not a self-help project

  His turning point out of depression wasn't the habits but telling eight close friends and family, some of them Harvard peers and competitors. They called, emailed and visited; one brought cupcakes. That connection made the habits feel worth doing. He's skeptical of endless self-analysis without action, describing a fellow plane passenger reciting years of therapy insights to a stranger.

• 06

  Loneliness is about meaning, not headcount

  Achor cites a Stanford study finding loneliness had nothing to do with how many people are in your life; it's the absence of meaning in those relationships, including whether you're doing anything meaningful for others. His grandmother put it simply: if you want a friend, be a friend.

• 07

  Diversify your 'meaning portfolio'

  To a 65-year-old mother, four years past breast cancer treatment, whose happiness rests on her unhappy 26-year-old son, Achor says love necessarily involves pain, but she's telling her story as a side character in his. When all meaning is in one 'stock,' a child or work, happiness becomes fragile. Mel recalls promising herself to put the laptop away on planes when work became her only source of meaning.

• 08

  You shouldn't feel happy all the time

  Achor says constant happiness would signal being divorced from reality. Healthy people swing between days of connection and days of struggle, a point echoed by his mentor Tal Ben-Shahar's line that you're never as great or as bad as you think. Mel adds that the people we love sometimes need to struggle, as she learned watching her husband's depression: you can hold space but can't do the work for them.

• 09

  Happiness is an option, not a choice

  Achor used to sign books 'happiness is a choice' but stopped, because in a crisis without practice it can feel like a burden. When Mel suggests 'option,' he adopts it. The choice is harder with chronic illness, racism or a depressed child, but still available, and meaning often comes from other people even when your body feels like a prison.