Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Appearances
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Nature plays a huge role in happiness. They've even done studies that when people visit parks, you see their tweets, and the mood of their tweets goes way up when they're in a park. And even for four hours after they've been in the park, they're still bathing in the happiness of their walk through the park. Being in a park, the data says, gives a mood boost equivalent to Christmas Day.
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Yeah, exactly. So stuff is a great example of that, that buying stuff doesn't make people happy. Work is a great example of that. When they ping people and when people are working, they on average, it's the second least happy activity. The only more miserable activity is being sick in bed.
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So the average person when they're working reports being unhappy and the world doesn't necessarily tell you that.
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so in the quest to find love and the perfect partner how how can data help us there yeah so i think the big lesson from the data on dating and romantic fulfillment is that there's an enormous disconnect between what people seek and what people what makes people happy so if you look at data from dating sites What do people try to date? They try to date someone beautiful.
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They try to date someone tall if it's a man. Tall men are much more likely to be clicked on to get messages on online dating sites. They try to date men with certain sexy occupations. Lawyers do very well in dating. Military men, firemen do very well in dating. They try to date people with sexy names. There are all these names that lead to better dating success.
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They try to date people similar to themselves, even on silly dimensions. They try to date someone with their same initials. It's been shown that you're 11.3% more likely to match with someone if they share your initials. For some reason, people think this is attractive to people. And when you actually look at the data and what makes people happy in romantic relationships,
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These things that people are drawn to tend not to correlate with long-term happiness. People who end up with beautiful partners really don't report that they're happier. People end up with taller men or men in desired occupations, or even people with lots of similarity to themselves don't report greater happiness.
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If there's anything that leads to happiness, it tends to be the psychological traits in a partner. a partner having a growth mindset, being conscientious, satisfied with life, happy. This is from the largest study of romantic partners, more than 11,000 couples.
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Also dating, there's this Christian Rudder studied hundreds of thousands of couples on OkCupid, an online dating site. And he found that the most successful daters tend to be beautiful people. Think of Brad Pitt or Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Leonardo DiCaprio. Okay, yeah, we get it. Everybody wants to date them. They're beautiful, whatever. But then he found other people
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who did really well, these are people who had extreme looks. So think of like heterosexual woman who shaved their heads or people who dye their hair blue or wear wacky glasses. And what happens with these unconventional daters is they polarize people. So some people think they're really, really unattractive, but some people think they're really attractive.
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And in dating, that's kind of all that matters. So the data suggests that you can get 70% more matches. If you're not conventionally beautiful, you get 70% more matches by being an extreme version of yourself and kind of just appealing to a niche market who will be really into you. And yes, some people will think you're disgusting or hideous. Who cares about them?
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A small group will really like you. So that really surprised me.
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where it seems like the biggest decision that parents can make is where to raise their kids, and particularly the adult you expose your kids to. There's great evidence that kids are likely to follow in the footsteps of their neighbors. So putting your kids around adults you want them to turn out to like can be maybe the best thing you can do as a parent
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even better than things you just do when you're one-on-one with them. Kids may rebel against you, may turn against your advice, but they're really likely to follow in the footsteps of the other adults that you expose them to. So little girls who are exposed to lots of adult female scientists, much more likely to become scientists themselves.
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Black males who grow up around a lot of successful black males, even not their father, much more likely to have much more successful life outcomes.
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Yeah, so luck definitely plays a big role in life. But as far as success goes, it's less about getting unusually lucky. There are things you can do that kind of allow you to get more lucky and take advantage of the luck you have. There have been studies that show the most successful artists released the most work in the world. So they just put more work out there.
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They analyzed all the data of basically everybody rich in the United States of America, and they concluded that the typical rich American is the owner of a regional business such as an auto dealership or beverage distribution company. That kind of shocked me for multiple reasons.
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And eventually, one of their pieces just got really, really lucky. Well, other artists didn't put as much work out there. They questioned themselves. They almost pre-rejected themselves. And they didn't allow luck to find them as much. I think that's true in dating as well.
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And I think frequently what happened is the person who dates well out of their league just asked way more people out and was rejected more because, you know, you kind of, yeah, you eventually get lucky. For some reason, someone's going to be attracted to you who you wouldn't necessarily predict.
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And too many people pre-reject themselves and don't allow for that lucky break that that person who you're really attracted to also is attracted to you back. So even applying for jobs, there have been studies that scientists who apply for more jobs are more likely to get more interviews. Too many people pre-reject themselves, don't allow themselves to get that lucky break.
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Yeah, that's actually just not true. It's a myth. There are all these myths that data debunks. It's kind of a surprising idea, but it got a lot of airplay in part because it's so surprising where people say, you know, being outside a field can give you an edge that if you're too inside a field, you'll be too stuck in the ways of the field. You won't see kind of the
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surprising idea that actually works. When you actually look at the data, for example, of businesses that have succeeded, the most successful businesses tend to be started by people very, very close in that field. People who had real experience, not just in the broad field, but in the very, very narrow field.
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So if it's a soap manufacturing business, the most likely person to succeed in that business is not just someone who has experience in manufacturing, but someone who has experience in soap manufacturing. So, really, the outsider's edge is a myth that's gotten too much airplay, I think.
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Oh, the myth of youth in entrepreneurship. There have been studies that have shown the average successful entrepreneur in their 40s and the chance of starting a business increase up until the age of 60, which, again, people think if you want to start a business, you need to be in your college dorm room. There have been all these...
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examples of successful entrepreneurs, 19-year-old, 20-year-old, 21-year-old, that's really the exception. It's a myth. It's the exception that goes against the rule. There's a myth that entrepreneurs are failed employees because to be an entrepreneur, you need to think outside the box and you can't be a conventional working for the man and being a conventional employee. There's no way you would
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rise up to the top of entrepreneurship. Total myth as well. The best entrepreneurs are great employees. And if you're thinking of starting a business, the fact that you've already succeeded as an employee is a great sign that you're ready to go out on your own and start your own business.
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Hi, Michael Carruthers. Thank you for having me.
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But one of the motivations was that I'm a huge baseball fan and any baseball fan knows the story of baseball the last 25, 30 years, which is the explosion of analytics and data analysis to make decisions. So baseball has just totally been transformed by data analytics and
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and i'm a data scientist so i've worked at google as a data scientist you know every decision is based on data but it kind of occurred to me that certainly in my personal life uh like i don't really make decisions based on much data i kind of just like do what i think seems about right trust my gut basically and it occurred to me that you know maybe it'll be interesting to explore some of these bigger areas of life so you know
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dating, picking a romantic partner, career success, happiness, parenting. What would data tell you about these topics? Kind of a money ball for your life approach to the biggest questions that we face. And also, I knew because I'm kind of in the field of data analytics that there's been an explosion of really credible research in these big areas.
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I pretty strongly believe data is a better way.
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I kind of came into that with that idea because it's been proven in like every area it's been tested. They've tested judges if they have to decide whether someone on trial is going to commit another crime or should they or is it safe to let him be out, that algorithms are better than judges at doing that.
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They found that algorithms are better than principles at deciding whether a teacher should be promoted. They found that algorithms are better at doctors at determining whether someone should be given a test for a heart disease or cancer.
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so it's been proven over and over again and all you have to do is look around it's not like people are nailing these big life decisions as is uh you know if you talk about marriage or picking a partner i mean how many people do you know are in terrible relationships or uh divorced multiple times uh how many people do we know who are unhappy and career success.
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Certainly many people have struggled to figure out what they should do. So I think it's pretty obvious just looking around that the current approach of using your gut is leading to less than optimal decisions. And then the fact that there's been proof in pretty much every arena that's been tested that data beats gut is more evidence in my favor.
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Yeah, so there are these studies where they basically looked at the entire universe of people in the top 1% or even top 0.1%. They analyzed all the data of basically everybody rich in the United States of America, and they concluded that the typical rich American is the owner of a regional business, such as an auto dealership or beverage distribution company.
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That kind of shocked me for multiple reasons. I didn't think of auto dealerships as paths to wealth. I didn't know what a beverage distribution company is. But then you kind of dig down the data. They dig down. I dig down to the data as well. And you kind of start understanding what that means and why that is and kind of what it really takes to be rich in the United States.
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One of the big points about being rich is that the path to wealth is owning things, not a salary. So among the top 0.1% of Americans, there's about a three to one ratio, people who own versus people who make a salary.
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Well, they're not quite as bad as some people think. There are definitely a lot of restaurateurs that are in the top 0.1% or 1%, but it's nowhere near as good as, say, an auto dealership or a beverage distribution company or some other companies.
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so what is it what is it about auto dealerships or beverage distribution companies that make them the path to wealth well they actually have legal protections against like against competitors so you can't just start an auto dealership there are kind of laws of who's allowed to do this uh so uh you know one danger of being in business uh i'm an economist so there's something called the zero price condition which is basically if you have profits
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someone else will start a business and you're a competing business and they'll kind of charge a lower price and they'll take away all your profits. And that happens a ton in business. I think, you know, people don't realize just how hard it is to actually have a business that's consistently making money. So, you know, legal protection is definitely a good path to making some money.
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But there are other businesses that have their own protections that aren't legal. So market research turns out to be a really good business. Just a large percent of people who start market research businesses end up in the top 1% or top 0.1%.
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Yeah, they are very low. It's not as crazy as you might sometimes think trying to be a celebrity because there are ways you can dramatically increase your odds. The data also shows. And there have been actually studies of artists and what it takes to be a successful artist.
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And usually what separates them is not necessarily the art they've created, that the art is so much better than everybody else's, but they were just much more aggressive hustlers.
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So, for example, there have been studies of hundreds of thousands of painters, and they found that the painters who made it traveled widely to every possible gallery, different regions of the country, different countries. Any gallery that would take them, they showed their work there, and eventually they kind of stumble on a big break.
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And the painters who didn't make it, they just kind of presented their work in the same place over and over again, hoping that someone would find them, and nobody actually did.
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Yeah, I think you can definitely take the lesson from artists who made it. It depends a little on the field. So the more talent, the more you're judged objectively based on your talent, the less hustling is going to matter. So athletes, for example, sometimes it matters less how much you hustle because it's much easier to see how good you are. So, you know, a lot of the NBA stars are
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They didn't even play basketball when they were kids. They were just, you know, doing something else. And then they turned out to be seven feet tall and everyone's like, here, here, play basketball, dunk it. And they ended up being among the greatest basketball players of all time. So the world kind of just found them and discovered them and coached them and did everything for them.
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Many fields are more like art than like athletics, where it's much harder to judge who's got the most talent or produce the best work. And in that case, hustling is kind of the answer. And you can take the lessons from the data of artists and apply it in your own life. And don't just stay in the same place, hoping that the world's going to find you. Travel widely to get your big breaks.
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Yeah, so I became obsessed. There are these projects, it's called experience sampling projects, where they ping people on their phones and they ask them how happy they are, what they're doing, who they're with. And they've found the activities that make people happy, the people that make people happy, the weather that makes people happy.
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And I was telling people the results of these studies, I was telling my friends, and I'm like, people are happiest when they're having sex or going on a hike or when they're with their friends or with their romantic partner when it's 75 degrees and sunny. And I was telling my friends, they're like, these are so obvious. Do we need scientists to tell us that?
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But I think there's actually profundity in the obviousness of the happiness research that a lot of modern life is trying to trick us and tell us that if we work hard enough, make enough money, spend enough time on social media, we're going to be happy. But these don't really make people happy.
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So I kind of concluded what's the data-driven answer to happiness, to really life, because I think happiness is many people's goal for life. And I think the data-driven answer to life is to be with your love on an 80 degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex. Those are the simple things that tend to make people happy.
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And if your life is very far from that, ask yourself, how can you do more of those simple, obvious things that tend to make people happy?
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I think there's kind of this contrast between what the world is telling you about happiness and what commercials are telling you about happiness and what the data says about happiness. And yes, the data does offer simple answers to happiness. And I think the data there is basically right. Think of all the commercials, all the things you're advertised.
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They've actually done studies when people buy these fancy products, you know, stuff, buy a lot of material goods. It doesn't make them happy at all. It wears off very, very quickly. So the things that do make people happy, the data says really are that simple. Walks, hikes. friends, romantic partners, nice days, all these things. There's nothing more complicated than that about happiness.
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And I do think what gets in the way of a lot of people's happiness is they overcomplicate things and they don't do enough of these simple things that make people happy.