Joe Hudson: evaluation

Transcript context

…let's share more experiments people can run. Another is this thread that I feel comes up a lot in your work is you're just really big on helping people feel joy. Feels like that's the core of what you're trying to help people is feel more joy. Why is that so important? Why is joy so important, so powerful? I definitely would not want anyone to feel joy. I wouldn't want to push somebody into or like, "Hey, you should feel joy." What I would say that's a close cousin to that is that enjoyment is such an important tool for productivity. Enjoyment is such an important tool for living a meaningful life. Enjoyment is an amazing tool. As an example, let's say you drive a Ferrari, you're not going to say, hey, that's an efficient car. That's a super-efficient car. You're going to say, no, that's a fast car. Somehow in our own lives, if we get something done quickly, we're efficient, but that's not efficient. You can go and get something done quickly and then you're so exhausted. What's efficient is if at the end of whatever you did, you feel like you have more energy, like you're stoked, like, oh, I can't wait to do this again tomorrow. That's efficiency, is that you've actually used the least amount of energy to get something done. If you say, oh, I'm going to figure out how to enjoy what I do 10% more and you succeed, you are 10% more efficient. Not only that, usually, the quality is going to get a lot better too. If you enjoy running, you're probably going to run more than if you don't enjoy running. If you enjoy doing a podcast, you're probably going to make a better podcast and you're going to do it for longer if you enjoy doing it. There's something really, really important about enjoyment because it's not only a measure of efficiency, it also has a strong correlation with hire in most things has a strong correlation with how long you're going to do it, your staying power, the quality of what you're going to do, all of that. That's one of the reasons that I think enjoyment is really great. The other thing is that if you enjoy things, they feel different. I think one of the things that people do is they say this, they say, "I want to enjoy my life more, so I'm going to do less things, take out the trash, and I'm going to do more things like go on vacation." That's not how enjoyment works. You can enjoy taking out the trash or you can hate taking out the trash. That's a choice. Right now, somebody listening to this as an experiment that they can run is like, okay, you're going to stay listening to this for the next minute. How do you enjoy it 10% more? Typically, what will happen is somebody will take a deeper breath, they'll settle into their body a little bit more, they'll relax a little bit more. They might physically get more comfortable. There's a thousand things that they might do to just enjoy the experience 10% more. That, and in that, they're becoming more efficient in that the quality is getting better in that they're hearing what I'm saying differently. It's just a really powerful tool. What I know the problem to be is that some people will go, "Okay, now I have to enjoy life. I'm going to disregard all these negative emotions so that I'm in enjoyment." That doesn't work. It's horrendous. It's just a recipe for shit stew. Along these lines, how much of the work is learning to enjoy the thing you're doing more versus finding something that you innately enjoy? Which one is more powerful? I guess, which do you point people to? Which experiments do you find people should run more?…

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